Internal and External Value Multipliers

“A multiplier is a very simple concept, it’s an added variable that either serves to increase or decrease a given value. “

One of the things I think I neglected to adequately cover in that essay is the fact that a multiplier can be both positive and negative, and how it is regarded may be context dependent.

It’s quite common to make the distinction between internal factors in a company that contribute to its performance, and external factors that affect its performance. The idea of “core competencies” is perhaps the clearest formulation of how a company’s unique configuration of competencies, qualities and traits can become a source of competitive advantage. Examples would be 3M’s focus on innovation and new products, WalMart’s focus on high volume logistics, or Apples focus on high quality design work.

When applying the core competencies principle to a person the internal multipliers would be those things that alter the behavior of a given variable or set of variables based on a person’s internal characteristics. Men who write “How to vet a wife” articles often draw on such variables as a woman’s history of self control, loyalty or self-discipline, not due to these factors in and of themselves, but because the combination of these variables build a barrier towards external negative multipliers.

A woman who has a combination of love for family, traditional values and self-discipline as a core competency is according to these men a better prospect for marriage because they act as barriers for promiscuity, divorce and impulsive behavior, all of which are encouraged externally in our present social order.

External multipliers are those a person has little control over and which exist outside of that person. For instance, most are familiar with the example of going out with a wing who is shorter than you, so that you look taller by comparison. Likewise a woman may be a 10 in a small town, but a 6 in Los Angeles or Miami where beautiful women tend to congregate.

In my day job I’ve frequently utilized examples such as industry legal issues, or multi-national legal issues as an example of external negative multipliers, as these have a negative effect on the revenues of each company within an industry, yet are unrelated to the aspects of performance that a company has control over.

Choice Criteria and Value

The baseline variables of a human valuation judgment can be referred to as “Choice Criteria” and reflect those characteristics of a product or service that the person making the valuation deem important. For instance, if one does not care about what color phone one uses, then a particular model having many colors to select from adds little value, if the color of a phone is important on the other hand, having a wide-variety of colors adds value to the consumer as they have a higher chance of finding a phone that is the color they desire.

The clearly identified traits that women tend to value in a prospective mate as identified by the red pill and upon which there is near universal agreement within the community include physical fitness, confidence, high social status, social competence, success and maintaining frame control. There are many other variables that have been discussed at length, such as style, sense of humor and wealth, that may or may not have an effect, or where the effect is to a lesser or higher degree context dependent. For instance, a woman seeking out “alpha fucks” will prioritize appearance higher than wealth as a choice criteria, whereas a woman seeking “beta bucks” will prioritize wealth over appearance.

An interesting observation within the realm of sexual market value is that each sex tends to project their own choice criteria as the baseline decision making model of the opposite sex. Men tend to assume women select their partners judged by the same criteria as they would themselves and vice versa. This leads down a path where men attribute an over-average weight to their own appearance in every context, and women attribute an over-average weight to their accomplishments in certain contexts. The best example of this type of erroneous valuation occurs in women ages 35 and up, who having hit the wall and seeing their sexual market value decline, elect to reason that their value is now calculated based on the male value model rather than their own.

This is done through applying the characteristics and choice criteria that they utilize to conduct a valuation of the man, to a man’s valuation of a woman. This is not an uncommon trait among humans, our only reference for thinking is how our own mind works, and therefore we tend to project the same patterns onto other humans. However, in the case of men, the blue pill narratives that they are raised under, serve to influence their valuation in the wrong direction, away from their natural valuation and towards one more beneficial to women.

From an economics perspective, such attempts to influence choice criteria and thereby valuation are common in marketing, as this is part of product differentiation. If all consumers utilized identical choice criteria and models for valuation, then every market would be a monopoly for the company that successfully made the best product. This would be a case of objective value, as if every consumer prefer the same choice criteria and place the same weight on them, it follows that their subjective valuations would not differ from an objective valuation in any meaningful regard. A company that realizes that it lacks the ability to compete on a given product feature may seek to influence the market towards another product feature where they have an advantage.

However, as choices and thus choice-criteria appear to be context dependent at least to some degree, there are still clear patterns such as women as a group being drawn to only the top 20% or so of men and men generally preferring younger women. This is reflected in the female valuation of male attractiveness on OKcupid where a majority of men were valued as below average attractiveness.

In the graph, roughly 60% of the male population were rated between 1 and 3 on a 1 – 10 attractiveness scale, therefore, to the average woman, the average man is very unattractive. If one compares this to the male valuations on the same site, the majority of women were rated on a normal distribution. A flippant formulation of this would be that for men, the average woman is of average attractiveness.

Perhaps the most important observation to be made from this is the supply and demand implications this will have. As men view an average woman as averagely attractive, this has the effect of increasing female supply, thus decreasing the competition for partners. Whereas as your average woman views the average man as below average attractiveness, this has the effect of decreasing male supply and therefore increasing the competition for partners.

A potential explanation for this would be if female choice criteria were more uniform, but discriminating and male choice criteria less uniform but also less discriminating. The female distribution in the image, takes a form quite similar to an exponential distribution, which is a statistical distribution that has the key property of being memoryless. The difference between a memoryless and a non-memoryless property is as follows. In a process with memory, the observer gains information about them over time. For instance if X is a random variable expressed in terms of “Operating hours until a machine breaks down, intuitively if a machine has operated continuously for 100.000 hours we will view it as closer to breaking down than a machine that has only operated for 1000 hours. In a memoryless situation, events are unrelated to success, each new event has no memory of previous events.

If one assumes that female rating of male attractiveness is a memoryless, non-relative scenario, meaning that she does not rate the attractiveness of men based on her previous ratings, but each man in isolation. Furthermore that the man when rating female attractiveness views his rating of a woman in context and with memory of the other women. This could potentially be interpreted as male ratings of women being more objective and aligned with reality, where female ratings are likely to be heavily influenced by the present subjective state of the woman.

Value Judgements and Judgements of Value

One of the first things an old economics professor of mine ever told me was that an economist does not make value judgments, but judgments of value. The distinction here is quite simple, a value judgment is one where one distinguishes between “good” and “bad”, where a judgement of value is a quantitative measure of economic effects. The former type of judgment is very common in the philosophical field of ethics, and many economists make such mistakes as well, where they seek to merge the quantitative judgment with a distinction of good versus bad. The challenge of such conflation is that it undermines the objectivity of the person making the judgment by layering subjectivity on top of observable fact or adding additional moral criteria to a judgment.

This is not uncommon in the corporate realm either, where a company will justify neglecting their main purpose, which is to manage the resources of the shareholders in the most efficient and profitable manner, in favor of corporate social responsibility initiatives. Within the red pill sphere, one can observe the same factors at play, where men will try to rationalize away their own lack of success, or conversely the success of others through adding a moral factor. “He cannot possibly be alpha, he’s not living up to his responsibilities as a man” is a distillation of some who hold this position, where the core principle is that in order to be alpha one must manifest virtues (as they elect to define them), in other parts of life.

Such a change in the definition of “success” has profound effect on the judgments that follow, as it adds additional criteria above and beyond “market success”. In effect, it waters down the raison d’etre for the market engagement. Many corporations have clauses about wanting to be ethical, take care of the environment, to “not be evil” and various others. The fundamental argument being that by having such measures in addition to the profit motive, it creates brand value, additional value or consumer loyalty that warrants the split of corporate motives. In the same manner, one could easily argue that adding additional milestones or criteria to the concepts of “alpha”, “beta” and others, creates a more holistic self-development pathway for men.

However, in doing so one also waters down the most efficient route from point A to point B, as it not only becomes longer, but also more difficult to navigate. After all, with value judgments come additional subjectivity on top of an already subjective valuation of sexual market value. These have their own intrinsic resource demands, and may even be mutually exclusive. If one takes the Sexual Market Value graph from Rollo Tomassi, male sexual market value has the highest potential to peak in a man’s mid to late thirties. This is due to a number of factors, but primarily it comes from the fact that the man will have had 15 – 20 years to build value, socially, physically and economically. If one on the other hand considers that some advocate that a man should vet a wife, get married and have children around age 25, then this means that most of the resources that would go towards building sexual market value will be diverted to maintaining a marriage and raising children.

An analysis of such a situation is often conducted by an analysis of opportunity costs, wherein one compares the expected outcome of one investment with the best alternative investment. In the case of the position “Build sexual market value until you reach your mid-to-late thirties, then elect to get married and have children” against the position “Vet a wife and get married in your mid twenties and have children” I’ve tended to view the latter as the worse alternative due to differing risk profiles. In the former the major risk is the lack of availability of potential partners when one reaches mid-to-late thirties, whereas in the latter the major risk is that of divorce, and up to multiple decades of lost investment time.

The two are mutually exclusive options. Which one is the right one depends on which criteria one uses to judge the decisions.

A note:

I recently launched a Patreon page where I will be posting additional content every month for those who support me and I will do a Google Hangout for the highest tier Patrons (limited to 10 people).

I’ve also had some requests for consults, which I’ve declined up until now, but due to demand I’ve chosen to open up for doing some consults on request. For details please check out my Consulting and Patreon Page

“If one assumes that female rating of male attractiveness is a memoryless, non-relative scenario, meaning that she does not rate the attractiveness of men based on her previous ratings, but each man in isolation.”

Only time I’ve come across an example to demonstrate whether or not the gap in the stats of how women rate the attractiveness of men on things like OKcupid vs men rating women was a show I saw where they were showing women two photos of the same guy, but he was wearing different clothes in each picture. They were asked to rate which one was more attractive. All the women picked the guy as he was dressed in a suit. The other photo he was dressed in uniform of fast food employee. The premise of the show was do clothes make the man.
The biggest take away wasn’t that the women rated the man in suit as more attractive, but that the women couldn’t recognize that the photos were of the same man. Your post, this show, and what was found with the stats on attractiveness had me wondering if the qualities of a better photo, whether thru how the photo was taken or just thru the clothes the men are wearing, have a bigger affect on women’s rating of men than men’s rating of women. It’s well known better photos of dogs increase chances of pet adoption. Wondering if men ditched the cell phone photo shot in the mirror or living room as the profile choice, and used a better lit photo or something more scenic instead, would have a more drastic change in numbers found attractive. If women chose better photos, would men still just rate the woman on her looks.